Good flick, let down by poor scripting

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2002)

Not a big zombie movie fan but saw this to see what it looked like. Tho' the last time I saw a film to see what the technology looked like on the screen - Rohmer's the Lady and the Duke - I was disappointed. This was pretty good and looked great. The London scenes were impressive/amazing. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a film in two parts (potential spoilers) with the second half being in a manor house taken over by a group of soldiers. with lots of running around reminiscent of Blade Runner. sure, they had to get out of London, but it became predictable after that. and they could have gotten out of London quicker and had a bit more character development once they'd gotten to the Manor house (the character development was poor overall. the only really strong character, the female protag, had all her credibility thrown away at the end when she kisses the blood soaked male protag). Alex Garland (the writer), Danny Boyle (the director) and Andrew MacDonald (the producer) spoke after the screening. Mr.Garland stated that he enjoyed smoking then seeing films like the day of the triffids and the living dead when he was young. and thus was writing a film for himself when he was 18. not sure I would have wanted to see 28 days later after smoking... He also noted that he thought the film was better for the plot holes/lack of polish in the writing. I don't agree with this. there were two expositional scenes planted late in the film which stood out like a sore thumb. they seemed to be, just when you're wondering about a major plot hole, a scene was added to explain it away. the exposition should have been dealt with earlier/quicker, in my opinion. He also noted that a scene with people trying to escape by plane at an overcrowded airport was cut for cost reasons. sounded like a good scene. Overall, it worked. Story reminded me a little of Jeff Noon's "Vurt".